


big fun

by firstaudrina



Category: Heathers (1988)
Genre: F/F, Femslash February 2021, Gen, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:13:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29567322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina
Summary: Veronica, ten years later.
Relationships: Heather Chandler/Veronica Sawyer
Comments: 7
Kudos: 48





	big fun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kwritten](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/gifts).



> Written for [this prompt](https://clockwork-hart1.dreamwidth.org/53291.html?thread=1087531&posted=1#cmt1178155) at the fab FemFeb ficathon.

Heather comes out in Veronica at weird times. _How very,_ she still says sometimes, twisted up in sarcasm and smugness, not so very far from the red-lipped way she’d first heard it. When her new, non-Westerburg friends slide curious looks at her and ask, _How very…what?_ Veronica can only gape like a fish. _You know,_ she says, _very._

_What’s your damage,_ is reserved for the peak of frustration, late night cram sessions and fights with boyfriends; her bespectacled boyfriend senior year of college turns it back on her, _what’s_ your _damage, Veronica,_ and she laughs, tells him, “Buddy. You have no idea.”

She still plays lunchtime poll at parties, when they’re especially dire or maudlin. “Okay, so your win the lottery, but the same day you find out a meteor is about to hit Earth and wipe out all living things. What do you do with the money?”

Or, “Okay, so there are two cups. They’re both covered. One is poison. One is wine. You have to give one to your worst enemy and your best friend, but you don’t know which is which. You find out too late you made the wrong choice. What do you do?”

Her roommate Sheryl has to take her aside to tell her to knock it off. She’s making everyone uncomfortable.

“Some people just don’t want to answer the tough questions,” Veronica remarks, and puts her sunglasses on.

Veronica never really dealt with the Heather thing. There was a lot going on at the time. Then there were other things to do: prom, SATs, college applications, orientation, lectures, papers, graduation, finding a job, flaking out on relationships, going to the first session with three different therapists over the course of eight years and realizing each time that she can never tell the truth about anything. Her schedule was pretty packed. She had nowhere to pencil in _dealing_. 

But then she gets the invite for the ten-year reunion-slash-memorial service, delivered to her parents’ place and passed along to her apartment in its crisp white envelope. Hand-addressed by Betty Finn, who’s planning the whole thing. She even wrote a little personalized message at the bottom, with a heart. _Hope you can come, Ronnie! It’s been too long._

Veronica reads it three times. _Join your former classmates for an evening of tributes and memories to celebrate how far you’ve come from. You made it!_ They even printed a suicide hotline number at the bottom. Jesus.

“We’re not going to that,” Veronica tells her cat, Sal, and shoves the invitation as far in the garbage can as possible, under the coffee grinds.

Then she fishes it out.

Veronica goes shopping for a stupid reunion outfit at the consignment shop by her apartment, trying to decide if she wants to go respectable navy pantsuit or cerulean fashionista slip dress. She tries on the suit but it makes her look like she fell into her mom’s closet. Maybe she could just wear a turtleneck and a skirt, or jeans — was anyone really going to come for her for wearing jeans? 

Well, yeah — it’s Westerburg. Ugh. 

She’s returning the suit to the rack when she passes a display of scarves. Tied in a happy bow right in the center is a bright red one, a hundred percent silk. It stops Veronica in her tracks, unpolished fingers coming up to touch the finished edge. She thinks, _how very_. 

“See something you like?” the salesgirl asks brightly. They work on commission.

“No,” Veronica says. “I’ll take the scarf, though.”

Veronica probably still has the old scrunchie in the bottom of a box somewhere, or in her parents’ attic. She left it all behind when she left town, or most of it. She kept a couple words on her tongue and a few bad memories behind her eyes. 

Heather’s pink robe. The red carpet covered in its gentle snowfall of glass. The glitter of shards in the blonde hair swept over her face, covering her blue lips and glow-in-the-dark teeth. 

J.D., or what was left of him.

Veronica never buys drain cleaner, even when Sheryl gets on her about it. She just pays for the plumber. And she can’t deal with the smell of smoke — not cigarettes, but especially not the real acrid stuff you get sometimes with stovetop mishaps, accidents on the highway. They bring phantoms with them, flesh smells, unexpressed bile and scorched skin.

Veronica supposes you can’t really go back to a place you never left. 

When it came time for college, Veronica got in everywhere. Her grades might have been enough to get her waitlisted at an Ivy or two, but the essay was killer. Cue laugh track.

She titled it CHOOSE LIFE and wrote about losing her best friend and boyfriend all in one year. Ms. Pauline Fleming liked it so much she submitted it to a couple magazines without even telling Veronica, so she ended up in print, earning praise for her traumatized distance and ironic prose. She did it to get a little of hers back, a fuck-you to J.D. and a story she couldn’t tell without Heather. In the end she wished she never wrote it, even if it helped her get her first book deal. Wasn’t worth it. Wasn’t worth everyone seeing that little shred of sincerity right at the end, the part of her that really wanted to know —

Does death make it all more worth it? Does knowing there’s an end in sight give life meaning? What would she have done differently if she knew how it was all going to shake out? Would she have locked eyes with J.D. across the lunchroom that day — would she have walked away from Heather?

Sometimes she’s grateful Heather went out ignorant, bitching. Other times not. 

There’s a service at the church in the afternoon and then dinner at a banquet hall after. Veronica rolls up hungover in shades, gets one look at the blown-up photos decorating the altar, and takes her ass right back outside again. 

Four big, black-and-white faces. Heather’s old modeling headshot, her hair sprayed, eyeshadow blended up to her unplucked eyebrows. She’ll never be on trend again. Ram and Kurt’s yearbook pictures draped in a rainbow shroud. And J.D., a photo they must have gotten from his dad because it’s a few years out of date from when she knew him, and he looks young and less sly, somehow. 

Like that means anything. 

While Veronica crosses her arms outside and eyes the graveyard, a woman in a butter-yellow tent dress emerges awkwardly from the passenger seat of a sleek car, a parade of ducklings released after her. The car races off before the doors are completely shut. “Ashley! Michael! Amanda! Christopher!” she calls, then baffled, “Veronica?” And it takes her a whole minute to unlatch her name from the train, to realize it’s Heather McNamara speaking.

“Patrick, now,” Heather corrects with a wry smile. “Heather Patrick. Wow. Veronica.” Without looking, she snatches the collar of one of her ducklings, preventing them from wandering out into the street. “I really didn’t think you’d come.”

They fell out of contact sometime after Heather’s bachelorette party, when her time got taken up with nurseries and preschools and Veronica’s with anything but. She’s pregnant again, and already mom-ish at twenty-six, her hair tamed in neat waves just past her chin. She used to be the local weathergirl, but she gave it up after her first baby.

She gives Veronica a hug that’s only a little odd around her stomach. They both stare into the open doors of the church, but neither go in.

“Crazy, huh?” Heather sighs, and ruffles the nearest blonde head, which barely comes up to her hip. “Did you see Heather yet?”

Veronica’s surprised. “Is she here?”

“Of course.” Heather’s mouth dips at the corners, a smile suppressed. “She said she was going to piss on Heather’s grave.” And then severely, to the kids, “You _didn’t_ hear Mommy say ‘piss.’” 

Heather Duke is at the grave, smoking like it’s maybe the first time she’s ever done it, coughing and flicking ash without flicking any of it off, holding the cigarette away from her like it’s poison. Veronica lays her hands on Heather’s stone angel, standing behind the headstone and hoping she’s upwind enough to avoid smoke. “Gun shy?”

“I drank like four Evians on the way here,” Heather grumbles. “I’m dying. I just — can’t do it.”

She sounds the same, just an edge of a whine in her voice, but she looks so different, the most different out of all of them. Veronica is more or less the same — shorter hair, eyes a little more sunken. Heather Duke lost her baby face and she’s a woman now, her brows fashionably thin, with prominent cheekbones and a downturned mouth, straight dark hair cropped at her shoulders with no hint of a puff. She’s wearing a forest green skirt-suit. She’s already divorced, which is fucking wild. Her and Heather make Veronica feel stupid young, when before she always held herself above them. But here they are with their grownup lives while she still lets her recycling pile up.

Heather lives in San Francisco now. She’s an appraiser at an auction house. Absolutely wild.

“C’mon, don’t be such a pillowcase,” Veronica says, eyebrows arching. “Pop a squat. I’ll cover you.”

Heather debates for another long internal moment and then holds out the cigarette. Veronica is forced to take it. “Fine,” she says. “But make it quick. I gotta get in there.”

“So eager to hear all about our dearly departed?” Veronica steps to the side and shakes out her big wool coat like a screen. She makes pointed eye contact at the grass Heather is about to water.

“Didn’t Heather tell you?” Heather says. “I’m giving the speech.”

Veronica hangs behind with Heather’s headstone. It’s granite, or something, in the shape of a heart, its border decorated with roses, an angel draped around it with wings sorrowfully folded. Heather’s portrait is etched into the stone and even there she looks smug, like she can’t help it; like it’s just the way her mouth and eyes are shaped, to express maximum laughing contempt. _HEATHER,_ it says in big block letters, and underneath continues much smaller, _ELOISE CHANDLER_. Below that, her key dates, ’71 to ’87, and then, _BROUGHT A MYRIAD OF JOYS TO THE LIVES AROUND HER_.

Veronica frowns. “That’s a shitty use of ‘myriad.’”

“Don’t bitch to me about it,” Heather says, or might say, if she were here. “I didn’t write it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Veronica says. “I know you didn’t.”

Sixteen seems so much younger at twenty-six than it ever did before.

Veronica never really wanted to be friends with Heather, exactly. But she could feel a kind of violence building in her at Betty Finn’s lunch table, laughing over last night’s _Family Ties_ when she’d spent the episode sitting between her parents and praying for the television to blow up. She was straining at the seams of her knit cardigans, clutching her fingers until her nails scored her palms, restless in class for reasons that had nothing to do with her alleged IQ. When she and Betty would go on wholesome mall trips to buy high-collared shirts and skirts that skimmed past the knee, Veronica would visualize a stick-up, cleaning out the money from the register. She played that water gun game at the summer carnival and wished for a spray of bullets. 

She was waiting for someone to give her something to do, and Heather did. Veronica thought she was such a big fish in such a little pond. Now she’s in the damn ocean, and Heather’s underground.

“What were you gonna do, huh,” Veronica asks Heather’s headstone. “You weren’t gonna change the world. You’d get your vanity degree at whatever school your parents paid to take you and then you’d marry some asshole you hated, have some kids you resented, do charity when you never gave a shit about anybody else, and spend the rest of your life obsessing over whatever your kids were up to, thinking you could make up for wasting your life by controlling theirs.”

Heather sits on the stone in a red dress and smiles, tilting back on one elbow so her hair hangs down over the angel. “But I would’ve been the hottest piece of ass at the PTA meetings.”

Veronica snorts. “Like you would have gone to PTA meetings.”

“Oh, honey, I would have been the president of the dissatisfied housewives association,” Heather says. “Heather would have never left town. I’d have her in bathroom stalls until they sent her to Betty Ford. She’d be taking my notes while Heather made cupcakes for the bake sale, planning to marry my Ashleys to her Michaels. Do you think I would have fucked Heather’s husband just to prove I could? Maybe I would have finally fucked Heather. That’d be better than _Dynasty_.” 

“Nah,” Veronica says. “You’d never give her the satisfaction.” 

“Someone should,” Heather retorts. “Maybe then she wouldn’t be so high-strung.” 

“Jeez.” Veronica rolls her eyes. “Once a bitch, always a bitch.”

“Well,” Heather says, watching her, “It’s not like I got the chance to be anything else.”

Heather probably would have been a Remington girl, bored with college parties as soon as they weren’t something she could aspire to anymore. She’d claw her way to the top of a sorority and run it viciously. She’d put those girls through hell. And maybe, in that made-up future that’s come and gone, Veronica would have been a Remington girl, too. She might have let herself get bullied into going along and rolling her eyes, saying, _come on, Heather,_ when the hazing got out of hand but not doing anything except feeling sick in her stomach.

Maybe they’d push each other farther and farther until one of them cracked — a _Dynasty_ catfight complete with ripping off sleeves and grabbing handfuls of hair, throwing each other around a shared dorm, crashing into mirrors and desks. Veronica can see the headlines now: TWO CO-EDS DEAD IN SORORITY SHOWDOWN. The college would have to do a whole thing about bullying. 

Or maybe not. Maybe they’d boil over in a different way, two girls who were never supposed to be close. Like at Heather-sanctioned sleepovers, when Heather would fall asleep first clutching her teddy bear and Heather would follow soon after under a blanket of blonde hair. Heather would give Veronica a look over their sleeping bodies, not mischievous exactly but like Lady Macbeth; dark somehow, calculating, her eyebrows pale but heavy over those round doll eyes. 

She’d shake her hair so the red scrunchie came out, sweeping it over her shoulder and rising, tilting her head to the side so Veronica would follow. Neither of them could ever sleep, and they never got sleepy; they were too alert, night owls, until at a certain point they shut off like robots. Heather would show Veronica where the good booze was, and sometimes they’d come up with lunchtime polls, or Veronica would have to suffer through another of Heather’s diatribes, her college boy plans. She’d say, “Isn’t there something more interesting we can talk about?” 

And Heather would go, “Well, Veronica, I don’t see you dazzling me with your wits,” so Veronica would have to debate her, push back on everything she said until it was full of holes, revealed in all its superficial splendor. Heather was never fuming alone at night. Instead she took the criticism in with those Shakespeare eyes, analyzing and synthesizing, and finally she’d slide off the kitchen stool or wherever and come close, maybe say nothing or maybe say, “I’m sick of talking,” and they’d slip hands beneath satin drawstrings and never talk about it in the light of day.

Maybe they’d do that in their nonexistent Remington future-past, but in the narrow dorm bed with the door locked, and Veronica would have finally known if Heather tasted as expensive as she looked. She never found out.

“You’re always gonna be a kid,” Veronica tells the ghost. Now she is conscious of Heather’s round baby face, the way she wears that dress like a costume, how she thinks she knows everything and will never learn that she doesn’t know anything at all. She thinks Westerburg is the world because it was for her, then. “Sometimes I think I will be, too. Like a part of me really did blow up with J.D., and it was the part that could grow and learn and pay bills and think.”

“Please,” Heather says. “There’s nothing as mid-twenties quarter life crisis as developing a Peter Pan complex. Blah, blah, childhood trauma, blah, blah, I’ll never grow up. You wanted to be me so bad and you never will be. I win the arrested development. I win having no future.”

“Yeah, Heather, you always win,” Veronica says. She takes a drag off Heather Duke’s abandoned cigarette, her first in a decade, and lobs the dying stub at Heather. Watches as she flickers like the image on a TV with bad antennae. Veronica pulls the red scarf from her hair and shoves it into the narrow metal vase built into the ground in front of the headstone. “Still dead, babe.”

Yeah. Still dead.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr [@firstaudrina.](https://firstaudrina.tumblr.com/)


End file.
